Cloning Is No Extinction Panacea

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Cloning Is No Extinction Panacea

In the tooth-and-nail fight to stay on the planet, wild animals are losing, with experts estimating that species are becoming extinct at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 a year.

But what if cloning could slow those numbers?

The recent announcement that scientists at the University of Oxford in England that they had mapped the first-ever complete mitochondrial sequences from an extinct species is a reminder that, while the Jurassic Park scenario of bringing back the dinosaurs remains a fantasy, the notion of cloning endangered animals is entirely possible.

But a split has developed among conservationists.

In one camp are the "frozen zoos," organizations that collect the sperm, cells and other tissues of endangered and extinct animals. In the other are those who believe that such work distracts from the real issue of habitat destruction, one of the primary reasons animals are endangered in the first place.

"There is no one solution to saving endangered species," Dr. Betsy Dresser, senior vice president and director of the Audubon Nature Institute's Center for Research of Endangered Species (AICRES). "It's truly a multifaceted kind of problem. Simply saving habitat, which is not simple and is incredibly complex, is not going to save endangered species."

Scientists agree that making more woolly mammoths, T. Rexes or anything from ancient DNA, is not possible. Forays to clone their DNA – and the Oxford researchers' mapping of the sequences of a Madagascan elephant-bird and two giant moas, a flightless bird from New Zealand that disappeared about 400 years ago – were not an effort to bring the animals back, but to study their evolution.

Critics of endangered species cloning say that's just where the genetic efforts should stop.

Of the moa study, Dr. Alan Cooper, Director of Oxford's Ancient Biomolecules Center, said in a statement, "It is critical that we do not become complacent in our conservation efforts and start assuming that we will be able to bring things back to life if they do become extinct."

Which isn't to say no one is working on it.

In January, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) successfully cloned a gaur named Noah, an endangered wild ox native to Southeast Asia, only to see it die of a bacterial infection two days later.

Undaunted, ACT's vice president of medical and scientific development, Dr. Robert P. Lanza, says the company now has government permission to clone a bucardo, an extinct Spanish mountain goat, using cells taken from the last member of its species.

While conservation isn't ACT's main line of work – the company has patented a method of cloning mammals for human transplantation and the production of biopharmaceuticals – Lanza said the work with the gaur and the bucardo utilizes the same technology.

"This is more of a demonstration than an experiment," he said.

However, Glenn McGee, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and former member of ACT's ethics board, said cloning is a waste of time and a danger to the real work of conserving biodiversity.

"It's cute science run amok," McGee said.

Like many conservationists, he worries the public will consider animal cloning not only as a panacea, but as a good excuse to let slip the more difficult remedies of controlling pollution and overpopulation, and protecting land from development.

McGee says using expensive technology to save animals while destroying their habitat is pointless, and that while "frozen zoos" can produce a few animals, not enough can be cloned to foster true biodiversity.

"You can't repopulate with a couple of genomes," he said. Right now, cloning "doesn't produce a large group of animals. It only produces one. And you can't have Noah's ark from only one or two animals."

But the idea isn't to "mass produce" animals, AICRES Dresser said.

Located in New Orleans, AICRES holds thousands of tissue samples from hundreds of species. AICRES has produced test-tube caracals, a species of African cat, as well as an African wildcat by implanting an embryo into a domestic housecat.

"We're using these technologies as management tools," she said, adding that cloning and assisted reproduction is in the early stages of development and that DNA frozen today could be invaluable to future scientists working to save an endangered species.

However, another criticism is that cloned animals won't be at all like their extinct and endangered forebears.

"Cloning itself is an abnormal procedure," said Dr. Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College and a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

One of the problems boils down to eggs. While many tissues can be kept frozen for years, eggs "don't freeze well at all," Dresser said.

The current technique is to use cells from the extinct animal with the egg of a closely related animal that's still alive. In the case of Noah the gaur, the mother was not a female gaur, but a common Angus-Hereford cow.

Dresser disagrees. "The genetics are the same from a cloned animal." Which is to say that although Noah was born from a cow egg, it was still all gaur.

Dresser said that some questions remain about the mitochondrial DNA, the structures inside cells that produce energy.

"We don't think those are transferred, but nobody really knows that for sure," she said.

Even if cloning does save some species, the issue of saving biodiversity remains.

With countless species going extinct, replacing every creature in an ecosystem probably would be impossible. To fully reconstruct a habitat would mean not only recreating monkeys, wolves and birds, but also beetles, flies and frogs.

"I doubt it's possible to get them all," said AICRES spokeswoman Sarah Burnette.

Both ACT's Lanza and the staff at AICRES agree that habitat preservation is crucial, but maintain that cloning and assisted reproduction are indispensable aspects of conservation.

As Burnette put it, "What if 100 years from now people finally figure out how to save the habitats, but there are no animals? (Cloning) is part of the answer."